This volume focuses on a wide range of Victorian-era objects from Britain and the United States in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The following topics are explored: still-life painting in nineteenth-century America; the burgeoning Victorian print market; a fascinating sketchbook used by the English painter Edward Burne-Jones; a spectacular Gothic-style British wine cabinet; and a rare photographic album compiled by an aristocratic English family. Also featured, in a portfolio section, are other highlights from the museumâ€™s Victorian collection, including furniture, paintings, photographs, textiles, and works on paper by such noted artists as Julia Margaret Cameron, William Morris, and John Everett Millais.

This handsomely produced volume, featuring 128 full-page color illustrations, showcases a wide-ranging selection of the most outstanding works from Canadas largest art museum. Each of the pieces chosen for inclusion is introduced by a curatorial specialist, who sets it in its historical context and comments on its meaning and its place in the artists oeuvre. Pride of place is given to the Gallerys unparalleled holdings in Canadian art, but European artpaintings, sculptures, prints, and drawingsis equally well represented. Masterworks from the Inuit art collection are also included, as well as examples from the Gallerys small but distinguished Asian collection. In recent decades, photographs have become an increasingly important part of the Gallerys collecting mandate, both through its own collection and that of its affiliate the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, and this emphasis too is amply reflected here.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art began acquiring American drawings in 1880 and has since amassed a spectacular collection of more than 1,400 works in watercolor, pastel, ink, graphite, chalk, and charcoal. This beautifully produced catalogue, the first volume in a series devoted to the museum's rich holdings, presents works by artists born before 1835, including such great American artists as John Singleton Copley, Thomas Cole, George Inness, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. In his introduction, Kevin J. Avery describes the acquisitions history of American drawings at the Metropolitan from 1880 to the present day. Marjorie Shelley writes on the materials and techniques used by American draftsmen from the eighteenth century until about 1875. The catalogue section of the book features 106 of the Museum's choicest drawings and watercolors, discussed in detail and reproduced in color. A checklist follows of the museum's complete collection of early works on paper, with black-and-white illustrations of 430 additional works and brief artist biographies.

This detailed volume is the first catalog in 65 years of the 168 British paintings at the Huntington Library Art Collection and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, CA. All the paintings are cataloged with standard information; 123 of them also receive a fuller discussion that includes information about the artist, the painting's provenance, exhibitions at which it was shown, and technical details about its physical condition sometimes with illustrations. This is followed by information about the subject whether portrait or landscape in as full and scholarly a manner as could be desired. The entries abound with full-scale footnotes. The quality of the photographs throughout is superb, as is the scholarship. Fully and carefully indexed, the work also includes Bennett's well-written and informative essay, "The Formation of Henry E. Huntington's Collection of British Paintings." This is a splendid scholarly achievement not likely to be superseded as well as a beautifully produced volume that is a joy to use. Editor and catalogers are to be congratulated on a book that belongs in most libraries. Martin Chasin, Adult Inst., Bridgeport, CT Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Affluent Boston was among the first American cities to establish a museum of fine arts, in 1870. By 1888, an observer was describing the enthusiasm with which self-confident Boston families were buying the works of "those mad outlaws, the Impressionists." Such early acquisitions form the basis of the MFA Boston's superlative collection, which could never be amassed today; the museum owns 38 works by Monet, for example, the largest group of Monets outside Paris. Masterpiece Paintings from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston presents 125 of the museum's finest treasures.

Since its founding at the turn of the century, the New Britain Museum of American Art has focused on collecting works by American artists. The finest paintings and sculpture from this important collection are featured in full-color reproductions in this illustrated volume. Included are many outstanding paintings by the foremost representatives of American Impressionism such as Mary Cassatt and Childe Hassam, and the famous mural series Arts of Life in America by Thomas Hart Benton. Colonial portraits and genre scenes, landscapes of the Hudson River School, African-American art from the Harlem Renaissance, and masterpieces from various nineteenth-century movements reveal the historical breadth of this collection. Color reproductions of the artworks are accompanied by biographical sketches on the artists and comprehensive essays on each of the works.

One of the most significantand least studiedforms of postwar art collecting in the United States has been the corporate collection. This beautiful book documents one of the most important and widely exhibited of these holdings: the collection of Sara Lee Corporation, fifty-two works selected from the personal collection of Sara Lees founder, Nathan Cummings.

With major masterpieces ranging from an 1872 painting by Claude Monet to a 1964 bronze by Henry Moore, the Sara Lee Collection was assembled in 1980, five years before Cummingss death. Since then it has been exhibited in or made loans to many museums throughout the world. In 1998, the corporation announced an unprecedented gift of the entire collection to a group of forty art museums, twenty-five in the United States and fifteen in international cities in which Sara Lee Corporation has a major presence. This Millennium Gift is the largest single gift to the arts in American history and the first to include institutions outside the United States.

This book discusses the Nathan Cummings Collection, the Sara Lee Collection, and the Millennium Gift. It also includes an essay on each of the fifty-two works that places the work in the context of the artists oeuvre, proposes new interpretations, and discusses the position of the art in the collections of the recipient museums throughout the world. Lavishly illustrated, the book also provides more than 200 comparative photographs.

This delightful book brings together 160 famous American figures from Pocahontas to Louis Armstrong, providing both visual and verbal portraits to illuminate their places in American life. The portraiture-paintings, sculptures, photographs, cartoons-and the literary images-eyewitness accounts, memoirs, poems, letters, and biographies-are accompanied by lively and informative commentary by the editors.

The list of master artists whose work is housed in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, seems endless. This massive volume contains rich color reproductions of works by Pollock, Brancusi, Cezanne, Picasso, and hundreds of other artists. The arrangement of the paintings and sculptures shows a strong curatorial hand, for often the works of two or more artists are mingled to illustrate the impact of one artist on another. To enhance the experience of leafing through this book, John Walker, director emeritus of the museum, places the artists and their work in historical, artistic, and social context with concise, revealing essays. Walker also discusses the inception and evolution of the gallery as well as the collecting habits and tastes of its major benefactors, people such as Andrew Mellon and Chester Dale. This book is an excellent companion to the museum and an wonderful addition to any art lover's collection.

This lavish catalogue presents 150 European paintings, pastels, and drawings from the late fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth century that have been given to the Metropolitan Museum by Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman or are still held in Mrs. Wrightsmans private collection. These notable works were collected over the past four decades, many of them with the Museum in mind; some were purchased by the Museum through the Wrightsman Fund.

Highlights of the book include masterpieces by Vermeer, El Greco, Rubens, Van Dyck, Georges de La Tour, Jacques-Louis David, and Caspar David Friedrich as well as numerous paintings by the eighteenth-century Venetian artists Canaletto, Guardi, and the Tiepolos, father and son, plus a dozen remarkable portrait drawings by Ingres. Each work is reproduced in color and is accompanied by a short essay.

Conventional wisdom suggests that portraiture lost its relevance in the twentieth century, that it was too tied to representation and biographical narrative to compete. Why then, the vitality of the the National Portrait Gallery's twentieth-century images in "Eye Contact?" Far from confirming a moribund tradition, these pictures are variously adventurous, assertive, witty, monumental, or confrontational, and all reflect modern aesthetic concerns. Fifty graphic masterpieces representing the American artistic tradition from the 1880s to the 1980s are showcased in this volume, including the work of such renowned artists as Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, Jacob Lawrence, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein. Life portraits of well-known Americans, from politicians and inventors to writers, artists, and musicians are represented. Theodore Roosevelt, W.C. Fields, Alice B. Toklas, Igor Stravinsky, Stokely Carmichael, Truman Capote, and Robert F. Kennedy number among them.

Outside Britain itself, the richest holdings of British art are found in American collections. This extraordinary presentation of some 85 works pays tribute to this strength of American collecting, while offering a fresh and engaging account of the history of painting in Britain from the sixteenth century to the present. The selection is drawn from collections from around the United States, both public and private, and includes spectacular pictures from the Yale Center for British Art and the Huntington Art Collections in Californiathe two leading collections of British art in America. Among the highlights are such masterpieces as Sir Anthony Van Dyck's portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria with her dwarf, Sir Jeffrey Hudson, William Hogarth's Beggar's Opera, Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy, Henry Fuseli's Nightmare, John Constable's Hadleigh Castle, J. M. W. Turner's Staffa, Fingal's Cave, and William Holman Hunt's Lady of Shalott. Following introductory essays by Malcolm Warner on anglophilia and art, and by Robyn Asleson on the history of collecting British art in the States, each painting is reproduced in color, with a discussion of its artistic importance and the circumstances of its crossing the Atlantic.

As the new nation began its journey through history, Charles Willson Peale reasoned that it would be valuable for a republic to have the likenesses of those who had played a prominent part in the struggle for independence.

This visually stunning publication, which focuses on a wide range of the finest examples of decorative arts created in this country between 1650 and 1920, presents the heart and soul of the American art collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. The introduction sets the tone of the catalog with an essay on the evolution of the collection, including context regarding the rise of Chicago as a major urban center after The Great Fire of 1871. Following this, the catalog is divided into four chapters, each representing a different era in American art history: "Colony to Nation," "Young Republic," "Civil War Era and the Gilded Age," and "Modern Era." The featured artifacts are placed in historical context through brief essays accompanying each painting or piece of sculpture, furniture, or silver or glassware. Among the host of artists represented are John Singleton Copley, Frederic Remington, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and Frank Lloyd Wright. This noteworthy volume is highly recommended for all types of library collections focusing on American or decorative arts. Stephen Allan Patrick, East Tennessee State Univ. Lib., Johnson City Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This lavishly illustrated book presents eighty paintings from the glorious collection of the Yale Center for British Art. Along with an account of Paul Mellon?s lifelong passion for British culture and his contributions to the formation and housing of this collection, the book includes brief essays on each paintingworks that span five centuries and represent such leading British artists as Hogarth, Gainsborough, Stubbs, Turner, Constable, and Bonington.

An underappreciated gem, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, is the oldest continuously operating art museum in the United States. The institution was originally founded to house the painting collection of the eccentric American rentier and art patron Daniel Wadsworth (1771-1848), and the American paintings still form the museum's core. Atheneum curator Kornhauser's two-volume set is a meticulously compiled catalogue raisonne of these works. Emerging from a vast amount of mediocrity are some splendid canvases by such Hudson River School painters as Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, and Albert Bierstadt, as well as works by John Singleton Copley, Winslow Homer, Henry O. Tanner, and John Singer Sargent. The best examples are handsomely illustrated in color, and all pieces?wheat and chaff alike?come with thorough and at times quite interesting annotations and biographical sketches. Art scholarship of the highest quality, this is nonetheless esoteric enough to demand a place only in larger academic collections. Douglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L., Cal. Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In Art in the Frick Collection, museum director Charles Ryskamp takes readers on a tour of the Frick's permanent collection, including paintings by Rembrandt and Vermeer as well as Renaissance sculpture and 18th-century French furnishings. Ryskamp begins with a biography of Henry Clay Frick, detailing his development as an art collector, and then guides us through the evolution of the museum, which is housed in the Fifth Avenue mansion Frick himself helped design and in which he lived until his death. Large (in some cases full-page) photographs of art are naturally the focus here, but the accompanying text, written by the museum's curators, elucidates both the work and the artists who rendered it. Illustrating why Frick's collection is a model for many other notable American art collections, this graceful book is worth the price of admission.

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